June Celebration!

It is a privilege to congratulate all of our staff and students on another highly successful year at Iroquois Ridge!

Our students have one more day of final examinations and then it is on to the task of completing semester end evaluations in preparation for the Provincial Report Card. Our School Team will review all of our students' results through our Promotion Meetings, which we look forward to greatly, as we know we will be seeing some fantastic results in student achievement. It truly takes a "team approach" to support student success and the partnership between students, staff and our parent/caregiver community is the foundation for that success. We never take our successes forgranted at IRHS and we know that there are ways to be even more excellent than we already are!

As the school year concluded, we had the good fortune of experiencing another huge, Halton Championship win as our Junior Boys Soccer Team took home the "Gold," under the leadership of teacher/coach, Mike Luyks! This was the second championship title for Coach Luyks, who celebrated a Halton Junior Football title earlier in the Fall of 2013. We are very fortunate to have the commitment of many teacher/coaches at our school who are dedicated to the growth and development of our student/athletes who always represent our school with pride and dignity. We will look forward to the utilization of our new, Scoreboard in the Fall of 2014, which has been installed on the south west corner of our athletic field. We are proud to promote our "Home of the Trailblazers" and this will add a special touch to all of our home games in Football, Field Hockey and Soccer next year!

As June comes to a close, we say farewell to some of our teaching staff who will be moving on to new endeavours. David Bell (English), Tammy Vrees (LTO-Science) and Kristen McCoy (Science/Geography) are off to new assignments at Dr. Frank Hayden Secondary School while Mike Tarantino takes his talents to Garth Webb Secondary School. Dani Shaft (Math) will join the staff at T.A. Blakelock; Jesse Hall (LTO-Math) will teach at Aldershot High School, Art Hilson (Business) joins the team at Syl Apps, Kate O'Connor (Science) will be on a Maternity Leave for 2014/15, while Chris Brooks-Prenger (Math/Science), Katie Capron (Math), Sabrina Sibio (English) and Alexiis Stephen (History) will continue to work on our occasional list. We are thankful for the great work these folks have done on behalf of our kids, both in and outside of the classroom. They will be greatly missed but we know they are on to new opportunities and challenges that will be of benefit to them and others. We wish them the very best in the future!

In a few days we will pay tribute to our Grads of 2014 at our Graduation Ceremony. This is our last celebration of the school year, which fittingly comes after our Graduation Prom! We will look forward to
celebrating with our graduates knowing that they too will be off to new challenges and opportunities, whether it be post-secondary, apprenticeships or the world of work. We send our grads off knowing that Iroquois Ridge has prepared them extremely well for the next step and look forward to hearing about their future successes as they experience the next stage in their young lives!

So as we look toward our summer break, I wish everyone well for a safe and happy holiday. May the sunshine always be with you and as the summer fades to fall, we will see you back at "The Ridge" for 2014/15! Never a better place to be nor return to!!